Mapping the Wessex Novel

Andrew Radford is Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK.

• Acknowledgements; List of Abbreviations; 1. Introduction: Making Wessex Novel Again; 2. Hardy's Heathens; 3. Archaeophobia: A Fear of Old Things; 4. Mystical Secrets and Lies; 5. The Return of the Nativist; 6. Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

‘Radford offers an astute and timely study of the significance that Wessex occupied from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in the writings of Thomas Hardy, Richard Jefferies, John Cowper Powys, and Mary Butts. In mapping these imaginative responses to, and constructions of, Wessex Radford, skilfully, excavates the sedimentary layers of archaeology, geology, mythology, and folklore that lie beneath this geographic region and circumscribe the complexity of the politics of place, of outsider and native, of national and provincial identity, at stake for these literary representations of the West Country.'